Well that took longer than I thought

November 2, 2012

I finally finished season 7 of Supernatural yesterday. There is one rule I have when I am watching a series on DVD or Netflix streaming. The rule is that I only watch one episode per day. It’s my potentially naive attempt to experience the show in, at least a somewhat, episodic format that a regular viewer would have experienced. Occasionally I break that rule, like when an episode ends on a cliffhanger and I really want to see the next one. Leverage was the first series to get me to do that and, I did it this time around with the last two episodes of this season of Supernatural. Even when I do this, I still don’t watch the episodes back to back. So, what took so long this time? I could blame a lot of different things but, the honest truth is that I got cocky. My fall tv viewing schedule was higher than I had previously appreciated. I’m currently following Dexter, Homeland, Boardwalk Empire, The Walking Dead, and Person of Interest. Two of these are new shows (Homeland and PoI both just began their second season) for me. On top of that, being the genius that I am I decided to give American Horror Story a second chance especially when I noticed Tim (Firefly, Dollhouse, Angel) Minear’s name in the writing credits. Add in a family event or two and it was “game over man”. Still, I ended with only five episode of season eight on my DVR instead of the four I predicted.

So, enough of my whining, what did I think? I kind of gave away a bit of this with my post when they killed Bobby. Oh yeah, spoiler alert. Anyway, I was surprised when they brought him back as a ghost which was cool given that they still had him leave permanently in the end. Bringing back Cas was less of a surprise given that he is an extremely powerful supernatural being but, I was glad to see that they still left him borderline useless to Sam and Dean. This sort of sums up my view of this season which I see as really being a rebuild and reinvent season for the series. This is a tough thing to do without jumping the shark (type those last three words into Wikipedia if you are confused). I honestly feel that the writers managed to pull it off with though. The only real concern I had was the use of Leviathan as the villain as it was yet more blowback from the whole apocalypse prevention storyline. Again, I thought this was handled well by the whole set-up of them taking over the corporate head character Dick (his name is Richard, actually). The corporate world is something Sam and Dean really never had to deal with before so, it threw them into unfamiliar territory which made for a lot of good pieces of story telling. I do have one complaint with Leviathan in that I was somewhat dissapointed that we never saw its true form. Imagine a sea monster whose length enters the mile plus territory and you’re pretty much there. With computer graphics readily available today, I was hoping for at least some sort of glimpse but, they went in a totally different direction with the character concept. Apart from that, I really like the idea of Sam and Dean kind of being taken back to their roots as hunters without Bobby or Cas to fall back on. Another thing I really liked about this season was the introduction of the character Garth. It was nice to not only see another successful hunter but, one who operates noticably differently from Sam and Dean. Like Dean says to Sam “He grows on you”. One episode in particular that I really liked and want to point out to people is Plucky Pennywhistle’s Magical Menagerie for a couple of reasons. First, it is an awesome send up of Chucky Cheese Pizza Time Theater. If you’re not from the US and/or don’t know what I’m talking about consider yourself lucky (and DO NOT look it up on Wikipedia). Second, the episode itself had a really unique and interseting ending which, while a bit of a surprise, was in hindsight well forshadowed during the episode. And like I said in my previous posting Death’s Door was pretty amazing as well. Good stuff, all around. Now onto season eight.